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Technology impact on our mass media and media use
Technology impact on our mass media and media use
Impact of technology on media
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Society is heavily influenced by media. Media is the primary means of communication used to reach the vast majority of the general public. Modern media comes in many different formats, including print media (books, magazines, newspapers), television, movies, video games, music, cell phones, various kinds of software, and the Internet. Media impacts and shapes society’s opinion on the subjects of politics, business, culture, and sports. It reflects on the freedom of speech and freedom of expression within a country. This can be seen in the various works of Neil Postman. Neil Postman was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known for his various novels which discuss the belief that new technology can …show more content…
never substitute for human values. One of his novels that discuss this idea is Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business discusses how the world has started to rely on the media and technology and how it has altered the truth. The idea that the media has evolved into a representation of the truth has become very prevalent in today’s society. It has been seen in various images and novels that which were influenced by Postman’s work. Postman uses various amounts of imagery and interesting quotes to express his ideas of all the wrongs that have been caused by media. In regards to Postman’s work, one interesting thing that can be seen just on the cover of his novel is the use of imagery.
The cover of the 20th Anniversary edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, shows a woman in a business suit and a man in a business suit, both with televisions as heads. This is just a small representation of how society has relied on media for their main source of knowledge and that it has taken over society's main thought process. Postman opens his first chapter by recounting various anecdotes illustrating that American thinking has become trivial. Postman writes that politicians are praised for their looks or physique, rather than their actual knowledge on the topics that are being discussed. Postman expresses that televised journalism has led to an increasing emphasis on style and appearance, rather than substantive information and knowledge. Postman does this in order to discuss the differences in typography versus media, news and entertainment, and the history of public discourse and media. Postman also discusses how the media has taken over our lives with this interesting saying “And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.” (Postman 15). This saying is a way for Postman to reveal the effect of the media-metaphor of television on our
minds. Postman later examines how media determines the way in which we define truth. Although Postman rejects relativism, he does believe a civilization will identify truth largely based on its forms of communication, which for our society is the media. What concerns Postman about the television is not that it provides non-stop entertainment; rather, it has limited our discourse to where all of our serious forms of discussion have turned into entertainment. Postman writes “Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged... ” (Postman 22). The way a culture defines “truth” is largely based on the means, mediums, and technologies through which they receive it. Postman speaks of truth as a “cultural prejudice,” and goes on to illustrate some of our own prejudices. Our society, for instance, is largely reliant on numbers to illustrate our truth, to the point that we often consider no other source as capable of communicating economic truth. In fact, we watch shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show not only to laugh but to find out the latest information. Thus such sources of information determine how we derive truth. Our media has become our epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Various images, which were influenced by Postman’s work, have shown the same idea that the truth has been evolved because of the media. One image that expresses similar ideas to Postman is the collage of words that the describe media and its effects on society. The words in this collage include media manipulation, distraction, denial, fallacy, control, delusion, diverting attention, persuasion, influence, deception, and many other negative terms. All of these terms are just proving Postman’s main thesis that we are not receiving the truth from media, but rather being deceived and manipulated by the media. They are only letting us know things that they believe is best for us to know not the real truth. They belittle certain topics, that actually have a large amount of valuable information. Another image that portrays similar ideas is one that shows the word “truth” but when a magnifying glass is held up to the word “truth”, it is revealed that it is made up of “lies”. This image divulges how the media is feeding us lies and claiming that it is the truth. One of the main problems of this is that it is ruining our ethics and epistemology. The lying and deception that is done by the media can cause serious problems to occur. As it can be seen, society is heavily influenced by media. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business discusses how the world has started to rely on the media and technology and how it has altered the truth. Postman uses various amounts of imagery and interesting quotes to express his ideas of all the wrongs that have been caused by media. These can be seen on the cover of his book and throughout the chapters of his book. It has also been seen in various images which were influenced by Postman’s work. These images show how the media is deceiving and manipulating us, as well as how the media is feeding us lies and claiming that it is the truth. This can cause serious problems to occur in our society and that is what Postman fear has already happened and that it is going to continue to happen but only get worse with time.
Media, the plural form of medium, describes various ways in which we communicate in society. A phone call, email, radio, computer, news on TV, etc. are all forms of media. In our society today, the media plays a significantly large role in influencing society negatively, twisting one’s perspective of the truth. In author Brooke Gladstone’s, The Influencing Machine, she discusses how media is looked at as an “influencing machine,” that’s controlling the mind of its viewers. Throughout the reading, Gladstone guides her readers through perceptions of media and how it influences them to get readers to understand the truth about media and the manipulation behind it.
The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld is an original work, a highly researched yet highly accessible survey of all things media from the history of media/journalism beginning in ancient Rome through the Mayan scribes to the First Amendment press freedoms of the U.S. Constitution and beyond and how the media 's mission and its means have advanced through history. At the same time, Gladstone debunks claims of the media 's nefarious influence on people from mind control and presumed biases to "moral panics," recurring historical charges of cognitive distraction, intellectual diminishment, and social alienation, now lodged against the likes of Google, video games, and the virtual world in general as digital culture stakes
In the intro of my essay, I listed vague examples about how television impacts society. Throughout my content I did not elaborate on Postman’s believed the age of typography was, and the difference between the past and the age of show business today. In addition, I lacked comparing Postman’s argument to Francis
Neil Postman’s thoughts toward television and education would sadly not change after thirty years, but more technologies such as laptops, tablets, cell phones, and even social media would be added to the curriculum. Neil Postman would most likely be appalled at the amount of information I learn through the internet, and the formats that I learn the information in. For example, BuzzFeed News is an application on my cellphone that give information through videos, music, and images. All the formats that television used, but quicker.
Electronic media is inferior to print media due to the fact that electronic media can be bias, selective, and evasive for the purpose of entertainment. Electronic media serves as a form of entertainment with a main goal of serving their ratings rather than serving the people. It would seem that Postman would agree with this theory since he describes electronic media as a form of entertainment rather than a reliable source of information and facts in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
In the first chapter of Amusing Ourselves To Death , Neil Postman's major premise is how the rise of television media and the decline of print media is shaping the quality of information we receive.Postman describes how the medium controls the message, he uses examples which include the use of clocks, smoke signals, the alphabet, and glasses.Postman says a society that generally uses smoke signals is not likely to talk about philosophy because it would take to long and be too difficult. Postman also describes the way television changes peoples way of thinking; a fat person will not look good on TV and would less likely be elected President. On the other hand someones body is not important as their ideas when they are expressing them through the radio or print. On TV, visual imagery reigns. Therefore the form of TV works against the content of philosophy. Postman shows how the clock has changed. Postman describes how time was a product of nature measured by the sun and seasons. Now, time is measured by a machine using minutes and seconds. The clock changed us into time-watchers, then time-savers, and finally time-servers. Thus, changing the metaphor for time changed how we view time itself.
The many evils that exist within television’s culture were not foreseen back when televisions were first put onto the market. Yet, Postman discovers this very unforgiveable that the world did not prepare itself to deal with the ways that television inherently changes our ways of communication. For example, people who lived during the year 1905, could not really predict that the invention of a car would not make it seem like only a luxurious invention, but also that the invention of the car would strongly affect the way we make decisions.
Neil Postman, writer, educator, critic and communications theorist, has written many books, including Technopoly. Mr. Postman is one of America's most visible cultural critics, who attempts to analyze culture and history in terms of the effects of technology on western culture. For Postman, it seems more important to consider what society loses from new technology than what it gains. To illustrate this, Postman uses the Egyptian mythology called "The Judgment of Thamus," which attempts to explain how the development of writing in Egyptian civilization decreases the amount of knowledge and wisdom in the society. He traces the roots of technology to show how technology impacts the moral and intellectual attitude of people. Postman seems to criticize societies with high technologies, yet he seems naive to the benefits technology has given society. Postman can be considered fairly conservative in his views regarding technology. His lucid writing style stimulates thoughts on issues in today's technological society; however because of his moral interpretations and historical revisions, his ethos is arguable. For every good insight he makes, he skips another mark completely.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show-Business. New York: Viking. 1985.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books, New York: 1986.
The media, including television programming, cartoons, film, the news, as well as literature and magazines, is a very powerful and pervasive medium for expression. It can reach a large number of people and convey ideas, cultural norms, stereotypic roles, power relationships, ethics, and values. Through these messages, the mass media may have a strong influence on individual behavior, views, and values, as well as in shaping national character and culture. Although there is a great potential for the media to have a positive and affirming effect on the public and society at large, there may be important negative consequences when the messages conveyed are harmful, destructive, or violent.
“American Media History is the story of a nation. It is the story of events in the long battle to disseminate information, entertainment, and opinion in society. It is the story of the men and women whose inventions, ideas, and struggles helped shape the nation and its media system.”(Fellow) The evolution of media has influenced countless societal and cultural changes leading to the present day. But it didn’t get this far over night. It is estimated to have begun more than 30,000 years ago through the process of cave painting. (Crewe) Following cave painting, came the invention of books being printed on blocks “The Diamond Sutra”, the Gutenberg printing press, newspapers in 1640, photographs, the radio in 1894, television, and recently computers; which lead all the way to modern day social media. Through the hard work of multiple inventors the media was able to reach where it is today. It has changed the way people communicate with each other, mostly for the better.“ The way people experience the meaning, how they perceive the world and communicate with each other, and how they distinguish the past and identify the future.” (Gitelman) Or as we know it as: a new way of communicating information from person to person.
Media, in its largest sense, hypothetically is one small page in the large "book of life". However, nineteenth century society has based an entire chapter of their lives on what happens in every medium used for communication. Through the creation of radio and of television in the late 1940's, and the modernization of newspapers and magazines, specifically, American culture has devoted themselves to a mass communications lifestyle in which they base most of their well being upon.
Hence, the power of media has touched its apex in today’s age. Its societal, political and economic functions reflect its unparallel capacity to affect the human life in all spheres.
Media also influences the thinking of people and society in general through entertainment as well as advertising and marketing campaigns. It is the creative ideas and boost to the imagination that people get once they watch a television show, movie, commercial or listen to a certain song. The impact any of these forms of media can have on an individual’s thinking can change in that most of them view the various stars in the movies, TV or the music industry as role models and as a result, they start imitating them. This type of influence oftentimes will influence the way someone views a political